Matt Yglesias

Weekly Standard Prepping for War With Russia

Russian soldier in Kosovo

Justin Logan observes that The Weekly Standard seems to have spun its Great Wheel of Enemies again and today we’re supposed to be getting ready to fight not Iran or North Korea but Russia.

After three paragraphs of suggesting that we should be doing more to get involved in military confrontations with Russia, John Noonan tosses off “No one wants to be drawn into conflict with the Russians” but then comes the inevitable “but”:

But it’s useful to remember that time after time, we’ve extended our hand to Moscow only to have it slapped away. Putin clearly has grand aspirations for his burgeoning CSTO, with Poland shaping up to be the new Germany in another round of US-Russian geo-political chess. If Moscow only understands the stern language of action and resolve, then the Obama administration must atone for shabby treatment of our key Polish allies and move quickly to strengthen defensive ties between our two nations.

The part about Moscow only understanding the stern language of action and resolve appears to have been generated by a crude computer program of some sort. Stripping away Noonan’s oodles of overheated rhetoric, however, it appears that rather than “grand aspirations,” Putin has just about the most banal aspirations of all—under his rule Russia will seek to influence events in much smaller and weaker countries that are in its immediate geographic vicinity.

Meanwhile Michael Goldfarb appears to be coming out against the civil rights movement in this post, perhaps under the influence of Max Boot’s trenchant critique of Brown v Board of Education.

Neoconservatism’s Tradeoffs Problem

One of the signature elements of neoconservative foreign policy is a complete refusal to set priorities or talk about tradeoffs. Whatever problem we happen to be talking about right now needs to be met with bold and decisive action, casting caution to the wind, irrespective of how that impacts other things around the world. Matt Duss brings us a great example, the contradictions between the neocon approach to Russia and the neocon approach to Iran:

At an American Enterprise Institute event today — “Should Israel Attack Iran?” (yes, they’re obviously trying to get peoples’ attention) — former Ambassador Martin Indyk revealed an interesting wrinkle to the story of Eastern European missile defense system, which the Obama administration canceled last month, a move conservatives have heavily criticized as — what else? — appeasement.

Recounting recent meetings with Israeli national security officials, Indyk said that “the Israelis were upset at the way that Bush had offended Russia with missile defense” in Eastern Europe. The Israelis, like many Americans and most of the rest of the world, saw the deployment of untested missile defense technology in Poland and the Czech Republic as needlessly provocative of Russia, whose support is seen as necessary for any effort to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control.

A simple point but an easy one. Right-wing Israelis can easily afford to hope for the United States to take a neoconnish line on Iran. And right-wing Poles can afford to hope fro the United States to take a neoconnish line on Russia. But the desires of right-wing Israelis are in significant tension with those of right-wing Poles. And officials in the United States of America can’t realistically take a maximalist line on every point of geopolitical tension. Regional powers basically have their priorities set for them by circumstances. But the hegemon has the luxury of deciding what it cares about. That luxury, however, doesn’t eliminate the basic need to decide.

Rep. Shadegg Warns of “Soviet-Style Gulag Health Care”

Not content with out of control Hitler analogies, Rep John Shadegg (R-AZ) took to the floor yesterday to demonstrate that he’s a fool. Lee Fang has the quotes:

SHADEGG: You know, it occurs to me, and I’ll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we’re really getting here is we’re not just getting single-payer care. We’re getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care [...] It appeared in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. You can Google it. You can pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel. You can ask her about Soviet-style gulag health care in America, where powerful politicians protect their constituents.

Lee reminds us that “The Soviet gulags were a network of prisons and forced labor camps that held as many as 20 million people during Stalin’s reign of terror.” To compare a set of insurance regulations you happen not to favor to Stalin’s mass imprisonment and slaughter is ridiculous, and absurdly insensitive to the real victims.

Massive human rights violations aside, I would also note that health care was among the strong points of the Soviet economy, along with primary and secondary education, armaments, and mass transit.

Mutual Nuclear Inspections Are a Gain for the U.S. Not a “Concession” to Russia

Verifiable reductions in Russia nuclear missile stockpiles are a large gain for American national security. In order to get Russia to agree to reductions in their nuclear stockpiles, we need to agree to reduce our own stockpiles. Reductions in U.S. stockpiles are a gain for Russian national security, but they’re not a loss to American national security. We have no intention of launching a nuclear first strike on Russia, after all, and there’s nothing we could possibly gain from doing so. But of course American political leaders don’t want to agree to mutual reductions in weapons stockpiles unless the reductions are verifiable. Even though conservatives seem, in general, to have no comprehension of national security issues whatsoever I would think they could grasp this point since “trust, but verify” is inscribed in the Little Red Book of Quotations from Ronaldus Magnus.

And, again, for us to verify Russian disarmament we need to let the Russians verify American disarmament. And, again, there’s no loss to us in the this. The United States isn’t going to secretly keep missiles on line and we’re not going to launch a nuclear war with Russia. A deal for verifiable mutual disarmament is a huge, huge win for America. But as Joe Cirincione tweets out, the right is spinning the deal as some kind of unilateral concession to Russia.

Are We Still All Georgians Now?

This seems like some eminently reasonable conclusions:

A nine-month European Union investigation into the 2008 war in the Caucasus has concluded that Georgia triggered the conflict, but that Russia prepared the ground for war to break out and broke international law by invading Georgia as a whole.

Conclusions to the roughly 1,000 page report, released on Wednesday by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, also found that Russia-backed South Ossetian militias committed atrocities and “ethnic cleansing” of Georgian villages during and since the war. It faulted Russian forces in control of the territory that either “would not or could not” control the South Ossetians.

The report found no evidence to back Russian claims that Georgia committed genocide on the night of Aug.7-8.

As you may recall, last August it immediately—and somewhat mysteriously—became dogma in American political and media circles that the conflict was a front-line struggle between freedom and dictatorship in which everyone was supposed to embrace Georgian nationalism as a core element of US grand strategy. The reality, as we can see in this report, is that Georgia very unwisely chose to launch a war with its obviously-much-larger neighbor. Sober-minded people criticized Russia for a response that swiftly went well beyond what international law permits, but it would be very unwise for the United States to take actions that encourage small friendly countries to think that they can roll the dice and be backstopped by the United States on fights about issues that, like control of South Ossetia, have nothing to do with our interests.

“Appeasement” of Russia Paying Dividends

If every foreign leader had Adolf Hitler’s approach to international politics, then it would make sense to treat every foreign leader like Adolf Hitler. But somehow the American right doesn’t understand that Hitler was an unusual kind of guy, and insists on viewing every effort to engage in practical international behavior as the second coming of the Munich Agreement. In the real world, Obama’s approach is working:

President Obama, in his first visit to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, made progress Wednesday on two key issues, wringing a concession from Russia to consider tough new sanctions against Iran and securing support from Moscow and Beijing for a Security Council resolution to curb nuclear weapons.

It shouldn’t be this hard to remember, but international conflict tends to hurt both sides (certainly Germany wound up much worse off as a result of starting WWII) and cooperation hurts both sides. Cooperation is often hard to achieve, but usually it’s possible and it’s always worth trying for.

The Missile Defense Appeasement Debate

It’s Robert Farley vs Michael Goldfarb on whether declining to build an unpopular and unncecessary missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic constitutes some form of dastardly “appeasement” of Russia:

I’m with Farley, obviously. I note that absolutely zero Germans I’ve spoken with have expressed any concern whatsoever that Obama’s policies are going to lead to Russian domination of Europe.

Eastern European Missile Shield is Unpopular in Eastern Europe

Something that’s gone missing in neocon hyperventilating about Barack Obama not wanting to build an expensive-but-useless missile shield system in Eastern Europe, is that Eastern Europeans don’t want us to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Here’s Andrew Roberts of Northwestern University breaking it down:

More to the point, the public in both countries has been decidedly lukewarm about the treaty to put it mildly. Below is a graph of Czech public opinion showing that over the past three years, a nearly unchanged two-thirds of the public has been opposed to construction of the radar and an even higher percentage has desired a referendum on the issue (presumably in order to vote against it; the data used to construct the graph are available here.) And this despite considerable government propaganda and public antipathy towards Russia.

I don’t have similar data on Poland, but a poll from August 2008 (when the treaty was signed) showed that 56% of the public opposed the missiles and only 27% supported supported them. Support rose somewhat in October 2008 (after the Russia-Georgia crisis), but a majority still opposed the radar (46% to 41%).

It can’t be much of a betrayal of our Czech and Polish allies to decline to build a radar system that neither the Czech population nor the Russian population wants us to build. The right wants us to at great expensive build a missile shield that doesn’t work, in places it’s not wanted, to protect Western Europe from Iranian missiles that don’t exist, in order to antagonize the Russians. The fact that it would make the Russians happy to kill the system somehow makes it a bad idea to kill the system. The Russians would also be mad if we bombed their naval bases—is it appeasement to decline to do so?

Spite-Based National Security Policy

Prague Clock Tower, Czech Republic

Today, the Obama administration announced officially that it will kill a Bush administration initiative to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to protect Europe from Iranian missiles. This is a good call. Bush’s idea was hugely expensive, and massively illogical. For one thing, Poland and the Czech Republic aren’t in any sense between Iran and Europe. Nor is Iran actually threatening Europe with any missiles. Which is why nobody in Europe particularly wanted this thing built. The exception was the Poles and Czechs themselves who liked the idea as a token of America’s commitment to defend them against Russia. Which is how we wound up situation an anti-Iranian missile shield in a place that doesn’t make sense as an anti-Iranian measure, but does piss off Russia.

Conservatives, because they’re stupid and immoral, have decided that antagonizing the Russians is a feature rather than a bug of the program. Thus, Senator Jim DeMint thinks it shows “weakness” to stop wasting money on a useless but annoying-to-Russia program. Michael Goldfarb deems it “appeasement”. This is another example of inane spite-based thinking in foreign policy. Basically the idea is that if the Russians don’t want us to do something, we have to do it because otherwise we’re appeasing them and next thing you know Vladimir Putin will be marching on Paris.

Common sense indicates the exact reverse. In general, you should avoid antagonizing other countries and especially other major countries with which you have a complicated bilateral relationship. If you have some very good reason to want to do something that will antagonize Russia, then maybe you have to do it. But antagonizing them counts as a cost of the policy, not a benefit. When you take a program with a huge financial cost and no real security benefit, and then add the “Russia will be mad” factor into the mix the policy looks worse not better as a result. Matt Duss rightly sees conservatives’ anger at Obama’s decision as part of the catechism of Reaganism and the cult of missile defense, but it should also be seen as part of a broader conservative worldview that wants to lodge the United States in a lot of negative-sum conflicts and fails to see the possibility for positive-sum cooperation.

Tauscher Says No to Reliable Replacement Warhead

The Obama administration’s stated desire to get the world on track to eventual total worldwide nuclear disarmament starts in practice at the only place it really could start—the quest for a new bilateral U.S.-Russia treaty on bilateral weapons reductions. The Russians want such a treaty because in the short-term maintaining the U.S.-Russia nuclear equilibrium at a high level is a bigger burden on (relatively poor) Russia’s budget than on our budget. But the high equilibrium is a waste of our dollars as well, and it’s strongly in America’s interest to reduce nuclear proliferation as a general matter. But a lot of members of congress are queasy about the idea of a new treaty, basically because they’d rather listen to crazy people like Charles Krauthammer than see the basic logic of a win-win deal.

Josh Rogin reports on some of the negotiations with congress:

Senate Republicans are not completely unwilling to get behind a new nuclear reduction treaty, but they intend to bargain for concessions before supporting ratification. One key concession they will not get, though, is a revival of the Bush administration’s plan to build a new class of nuclear warheads known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead, according to the State Department’s top arms control official.

“I think there are a lot of people that still hope for the return of RRW and they are going to be sadly disappointed,” Ellen O. Tauscher, the newly minted under secretary of state for arms control and international secretary told The Cable in her first interview after taking up her post.

The RRW concept has some benefits if looked at very narrowly, but it’s by no means necessary to American security and would undermine the larger nuclear strategy toward which the administration is trying to move. Reviving the multilateral nuclear non-proliferation regime requires the United States to regain the confidence of non-nuclear states by demonstrating our own commitment to play by the rules. That means not developing new generations of nuclear weapons and instead moving forward on bilateral talks with the Russians. Press reports have repeatedly indicated that the Obama administration is divided on the RWW issue (with Robert Gates, in particular, being a fan) so it’s good to see a clear statement that they intend to stay on the right side of this.

US to Scrap Eastern European Missile Defense

Vltava River, Prague, Czech Republic (cc photo by kruhme)

This is welcome news if true:

Washington will scrap plans to put anti-missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and is looking at alternatives including Israel and Turkey, a Polish newspaper reported Aug. 27, citing U.S. officials. The U.S. plan, intended for defense against attacks from Iran, has met with fierce objections from Russia, which regarded the eastern European bases as a threat to its own security.

Per Robert Farley, this plan never made any sense largely because it’s proponents actually couldn’t make up their mind as to whether they meant this as a provocative anti-Russian move or not:

No one could ever conclusively argue why these bases were a good idea; they were supposed to deter Russia, but at the same time weren’t aimed at Russia, and couldn’t possibly have stopped a Russian attack. They were supposed to defend from Iranian missiles, even though no one could ever figure out a plausible reason why Iran would fire ballistic missiles at Europe. Eastern European missile defense was, in short, insane; it was conceived by missile defense fanatics in the United States, and abetted by policymakers in Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted a clear signal of US commitment to their defense.

Poles and Czechs wanting a clear commitment from the United States is understandable, but there are other ways we can offer that. The best approach to dealing with Russia on these big strategic issues is to move forward with bilateral nuclear arms reductions. If we can come up with workable theater missile defenses in key regions, that’s great, but then we should honest-to-God not get them mixed up with the issue of Russia.

Getting Real on Georgia Troop Training

Thom Shanker reports that “The United States is resuming a combat training mission in the republic of Georgia to prepare its army for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, despite the risks of angering Russia, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.”

This strikes me as very, very, very silly. If we want to decide, as a matter of foreign policy, that we want to train Georgian troops in order to bolster Tblisi’s efforts to stand up to Moscow despite the risk of angering Russia, then fine. We should look at the costs and benefits of that strategy and maybe decide to adopt it. But it’s mighty dumb to be pretending that the reason we’re training Georgian troops is so that they might be prepared for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. It’s perfectly clear to everyone that Afghanistan is being used as a pretext to provide training, and that Georgia is participating in the Afghan operation in order to obtain the training. The only people who we could possibly be fooling with this gambit is ourselves, and fooling yourself is a dangerous thing in foreign policy.

Meanwhile, before condemning Russia’s anger over this sort of thing as representative of Russian evil and irrationality, people should give some consideration to how our government would likely react if China started training the Mexican military as part of preparation for Mexico to join a formal defensive alliance with China. I think you’d see a massive freakout.

U.S., Russia Agree to Large Nuclear Arsenal Cuts

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

One problem in the international realm is that unproductive conflicts between nations are exciting and headline grabbing, while amicable positive-sum interests tend to be a bit boring. Thus Barack Obama heading to Russia, focusing his summit activities on an issue where agreement was likely, and coming away quickly with an agreement in principle to hammer out the details of big bilateral cuts in nuclear arsenals hasn’t attracted much attention. If Obama had done something much less intelligent and gotten in a big, but ultimately pointless, public argument with the Russians about NATO membership for Ukraine or something it probably would have gotten more play. But agreement is good and conflict is bad. Leaders who seek agreement should be rewarded. And it ought to be noted that what’s been agreed to is a pretty big deal:

Arms-control analysts who support Obama’s determination to conclude a new START agreement say that the stated reductions are significant because they are realistic enough to receive the legislative-branch ratification required in both countries, yet ambitious enough to act as a first step toward Obama’s vision of a world eventually free of nuclear arsenals.

“They’ve hit the sweet spot in finding numbers that will be a significant reduction and likely to get the necessary support in their respective parliaments,” says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons reduction and nonproliferation.

The numbers announced Monday, Mr. Cirincione notes, amount to a 30 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

In other words, that’s a roughly 28 percent reduction in the total number of nuclear weapons in the world. It’s also a powerful signal to the French, British, and especially Chinese that the United States and Russia are serious about reducing arsenals and that the Obama administration really wants to pursue a nuclear-free world. The fact that the US and Russia contain such a large proportion of global nukes is, after all, a bit of an anachronism as in pretty much all other respects China has clearly replaced Russia as the number two geopolitical player and in some domains the European Union has set itself up as a more-or-less independent great power. It would be very plausible for the Chinese (and much less plausible, though still possible, for the Europeans) to decide they need to react to this situation by “leveling up” and building their own arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Steps that give the Chinese confidence that they don’t need to do that, that the US and Russia are prepared to level down, will do an enormous amount to help build a more peaceful, more secure world. Not only in terms of the US-China relationship, but also in terms of India’s thinking about its nuclear needs and therefore Pakistan’s thinking and therefore the general problem of proliferation around the world. These reductions, if they come to pass, will be a huge deal.

Setting an Agenda for Cooperation

Red Square, Moscow (cc photo by Alan Cordova)

Clifford Levy and Peter Baker write for the New York Times that President Barack Obama’s top priority in Moscow is following through on an earlier informal agreement reached at the G-8 summit to enact bilateral reductions in nuclear arsenals though he “also expected to touch on the war in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism and the jousting for influence in other former Soviet countries.”

These proposed bilateral nuclear reductions are an important part of getting the global non-proliferation regime back on track and moving us toward global nuclear disarmament. But the choice of priorities also highlights something important about Obama’s approach to world affairs. The US-Russia relationship is multifaceted, and there’s plenty of stuff we disagree about. And within the category of “stuff we disagree about” there’s a particular sub-category of stuff that it’s exceedingly unlikely we’re going to agree about. Most notable among these is Russia’s relationship with the post-Soviet countries. The United States would like to see these treated more-or-less as “ordinary” countries and insofar as is realistic absorbed into the Western European order. Russia, by contrast, sees them in much the way that the United States has traditionally viewed Central America and the Caribbean—at times nominally independent but fundamentally part of a Moscow-centered sphere of influence.

There’s a certain amount of sentiment in the United States that not only should the U.S. continue to disagree with Russia’s perspective on this, but that we ought to somehow elevate such disagreement to the very top of the U.S.-Russian bilateral relationship. The president should go over there, denounce the Russians, get denounced back, and then come back to Washington empty handed but full of self-righteousness. This is part and parcel of the phenomenon whereby people don’t grasp the difference between a pundit and a president. It makes a lot more sense to focus a visit on something like the nuclear issue, where U.S. and Russian interests are roughly in alignment and some high-level discussions stand a decent chance of bearing fruit.

Avigdor Lieberman Goes to Russia

Clifford Levy reports on Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s trip to Russia where he had lots of high-level meetings and cordial discussions:

Israel’s new government has voiced its reservations about the United States’ new policies under President Obama in both of those areas, so Mr. Lieberman’s trip could easily be seen as a tactic — using his access in Russia to suggest that Israel might become less dependent on the United States and look to Moscow for support.

Even if it is just a bluff, his pivot toward Russia — which itself seeks a larger diplomatic role in the Middle East — adds one more element to a list of shifts under way in the region. All of these changes are traceable, to some extent, to reactions to Mr. Obama’s emphasis on improving relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds through diplomacy, and pressing Israel to stop the growth of settlements in the West Bank.

I don’t think you need to concoct anything as far-fetched as a total realignment of Israel’s great power relationships to see that this makes sense. For one thing, Lieberman speaks Russian. For another thing, where else is he going to go? The head of a quasi-fascist party elected on a platform of racial animosity isn’t a helpful front man for Israeli policies in the United States, he isn’t helpful in Western Europe, and he certainly isn’t helpful in Cairo or Ankara. But that’s not the kind of thing that would bother Vladimir Putin.

Last, it’s Russia more than the United States that could take practical steps against Iran that would actually be helpful to Israel. Will the Russians really do that? It’s hard to say. But it clearly seems worthwhile for Israel to explore the question of whether there’s something the Russians want from them.

Public Transit in Russia

Elana Schor writes up a new More »« Less:

Sadly, only one nation can boast that a majority of its population rides transit at least once a day… the surprising answer comes after the jump.

Russia ranked the highest on the Greendex scale, with 52 percent of respondents reporting daily or near-daily use of transit. Hot on its heels was China, where 43 percent reported very frequent transit rides. More than four out of five Chinese surveyed ride transit at least once a month, according to the Greendex.

I wasn’t surprised by this, Russia has excellent public transportation and a highly urbanized population. The Moscow Metro is absolutely lovely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro is pretty good, too, and at least when I was there Nizhny also had a good system of streetcars and trolleybuses.

And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods. But when it comes to things for which there is no real free market, Soviet production was fine. Soviet nuclear missiles, fighter planes, etc. were just fine. That’s why the USSR wound up falling apart over popular discontent rather than an inability to militarily deter the west. Cars, of course, are a consumer good. But there’s no free market in subway systems. So the Soviet Union had crappy cars but great subways, which led to transit-oriented lifestyles, and that legacy continues today.

Shoes That Have Not Yet Dropped

Someone asked me earlier today what I thought of the ongoing political unrest in Moldova. I didn’t have anything especially to say, but I was able to make the observation that there’s always the outside chance that Romania will try to intervene in the situation. Moldovans are Romanian-speaking and their territory was part of the Romanian state in the past. The protests are being characterized as “anti-Communist” in nature, but also reflect disagreement about whether Moldova should be oriented toward Bucharest or to Moscow. You can see this reflected in the fact that the party line is that this agitation is all being masterminded by Romania:

“We know that certain forces from Romania masterminded these riots,” Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Mr. Voronin as saying. “Romanian flags which were planted on state buildings in Chisinau prove this.”

You could imagine Romania and Russia both intervening in this situation as part of a regional tug-o-war. And Romania’s in NATO, so next thing you know maybe it’ll be nuclear war. But obviously that’s unlikely.

Still, the larger issue is that political instability in former Soviet Republics embeds a lot of potentially problematic international conflicts. And the recession is fostering a lot of political instability. Not only in Moldova but also (via Ezra Klein) in Ukraine where, again, domestic political conflicts are tied in with geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West. And there’s also, it seems, trouble in Thailand.

This sort of thing is probably the most fundamental danger in the economic crisis. Given enough time and calm, the policies the major countries have put in place should lead to a recovery sooner or later. But if “sooner or later” takes too long, the calm starts to go away and there are big risks of downward spiraling.

Zakaria vs The Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria is making sense, and The Washington Post editorial page is not:

Consider the gambit with Russia. The Washington establishment is united in the view that Iran’s nuclear program poses the greatest challenge for the new administration. Many were skeptical that Obama would take the problem seriously. But he has done so, maintaining the push for more effective sanctions, seeing if there is anything to be gained by talking to the Iranians, and starting conversations with the Russians. The only outside power that has any significant leverage over Tehran is Russia, which is building Iran’s nuclear reactor and supplying it with uranium. Exploring whether Moscow might press the Iranians would be useful, right?

Wrong. The Washington Post reacted by worrying that Obama might be capitulating to Russian power. His sin was to point out in a letter to the Russian president that were Moscow to help in blunting the threat of missile attacks from Tehran, the United States would not feel as pressed to position missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic—since those defenses were meant to protect against Iranian missiles. This is elementary logic. It also strikes me as a very good trade since right now the technology for an effective missile shield against Iran is, in the words of one expert cited by the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman: “a system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money that we don’t have.”

As Zakaria observes, the problems of the Bush years were not just the personal failings of George W. Bush; they reflected the pathologies of an establishment “that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise and negotiations as appeasement.” But to operate in the world and advance our key goals, we need to understand that other countries have interests and objectives of their own.

Rocket to Russia

This seems to me like a welcome dose of realism from the Obama administration:

President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday.

The letter to President Dmitri A. Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by top administration officials three weeks ago. It said the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.

This seems to have gone down during the Burns/McFaul trip to Moscow and I think it illustrates what I was saying about McFaul a couple of weeks ago—he combines a keen interest in democracy-promotion with a realistic understanding of Russia. What was so distressing about the Bush administration’s approach to this sort of thing wasn’t really that they put some kind of “ideals” ahead of “interests” but that they had no capacity to set priorities or ever make offers that had any chance of securing a “yes.” I can’t say whether or not Russia will accept this deal. But the deal would, if accepted, promote American interests. And, importantly, accepting it would also promote Russian interests thus making it at least plausible that they’ll say “yes.” It’s how diplomacy should be done.

Michael McFaul on Russia

Jason Zengerle links to a worthwhile realist take on Russia from Stepehn Boykewich that, inter alia, engages in the sort of more-sympathetic-than-you-usually-hear-in-the-American-media reading of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power that you’ll often hear from, for example, me. Zengerle says:

Whether Boykewich is right, I can’t really say. But I think it’s an important view to consider–especially in light of Obama’s recent appointment of Stanford’s Michael McFaul (who’s something of a hardliner) as the National Security Council’s top Russia hand.

Someone was asking me to characterize McFaul’s views a couple of weeks ago and likewise was coming from the default assumption that he’s a hardliner of whom I would disapprove. I think I said in response that that’s definitely his reputation, but I’m not sure it’s really correct. Or, rather, I think it tends to illustrate some of the artificiality of some of the foreign policy line-drawing. McFaul has a strong scholarly and policy interest in democracy promotion. And you never see him cosigning realist manifestos. And you sometimes do see him cosigning these kind of manifestos. That said, with regard to both democracy promotion in general and Russia in particular, McFaul’s a bona fide expert who really knows what he’s talking about, not a bullshitter who thinks it’s good to “be tough” or whatever. Consequently, he has, I think, a very measured and reasonable take on these things. I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with anything in his article on “Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” co-written with Francis Fukuyama.

Or take his long fall 2005 article with James Goldgeier on “What To Do About Russia”. I would say it takes more of a hostile tone about Putin than I would, but that the difference of opinion is really a disagreement about how we should understand Boris Yeltsin and the merry band of thieves who preceded Putin, rather than a disagreement about Putin. And the policy prescriptions are, again, measured and sensible. Indeed, the main policy argument is that we need to engage with the Russian government on an essentially realpolitik basis regarding nuclear proliferation and counterterrorism issues. They also argue that Russian conduct in Chechnya is harming U.S. interests in the broader fight against al-Qaeda, which I think is correct, but which relies on a basically realist assessment of the al-Qaeda issue. On the democracy front, they call for “[d]irect personal engagement with Russian democratic activists” in which we emulate Ronald Reagan who “accorded [] human rights activists the same respect that he showed for his Soviet counterpart” and for about $100 million in FREEDOM Support Act funds for Russian civil society programs.

On the whole, this is a modest, realistic, and somewhat realist agenda. And I think that reflects the fact that people who understand what they’re talking about understand that the world isn’t crowded with extremely sharp trade-offs between democratic and humanitarian ideals and American interests. Real hard-liners are people who just don’t want to cooperate with Russia at all, and who use the brutality of the Putin regime as a pretext for a highly confrontational security agenda on nuclear weapons, missile defense, and all the rest. But the people who want those things wanted them when Yeltsin was in power and would want them under any conceivable Russian regime, just as any Russian government would oppose them. If you genuinely interested in Russian democracy, you don’t crowd the US-Russian bilateral relationship with counterproductive hostility. And if you’re genuinely interested in U.S.-Russian cooperation, I think you do need to want us to try to find ways to exercise influence at the margin to push Russia back on a democratic path—cooperation could be deeper and easier with a more liberal, more democratic government in Moscow.

The Trouble With Propaganda TV

James Kirchick writing about China’s plans to launch a “Chinese CNN” to join the existing English-language propaganda networks from Russia (Russia Today) and Iran (Press TV) remarks:

Of course, there’s no scientific way to gauge whether or not these efforts will work, but I’d like to think that most Americans (if not most Europeans) will not be won over by the crude propaganda of countries that kill journalists and threaten to (or actually) launch unprovoked attacks against their neighbors. Never mind the cheesy production values and propagandistic mien of these stations. As long as countries like China, Russia and Iran continue their internally repressive and externally aggressive behavior, I don’t see how spending massive gobs of money on TV will improve their reputations.

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. I mean, who wants to watch a propaganda channel? There’s already lots of English-language television channels a person could be watching. I’m more sympathetic than most U.S. observers to the Kremlin point-of-view and even appeared once on Russia Today, but I’m never sitting on the couch saying to myself “gee, if only my cable provider carried an English-language Russian propaganda channel!” It’s just a stupid idea on its face. It’s worth noting that al-Hurra, America’s effort to launch an Arabic language propaganda public diplomacy network, has floundered from the beginning for basically the same reason—it doesn’t matter what your message is if nobody’s watching.

In all these cases, countries could, of course, improve foreigners’ perceptions of them by changing the actual policies that lead to the bad perceptions. But alongside that you would, of course, want a communications strategy. But what a country needs to do is go to where the audience is. That would be foreign governments engaging more directly and effectively with English-language media in the United States and American officials engaging directly with al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other popular Arabic-language media.

Explaining Communist Jokes

Paul Krugman, contemplating the prospect of TARP II: Geithner’s Revenge, remarks:

[I]t occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be appropriate: under Bush, financial policy consisted of Wall Street types cutting sweet deals, at taxpayer expense, for Wall Street types. Under Obama, it’s precisely the reverse.

To clarify the original joke is: “capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, whereas socialism is precisely the reverse.”

Russian Public Opinion

Julia Ioffe writes for TNR about the latest constitutional moves in Russia:

In the West, the amendment was met with a hearty round of “how could they’s.” It was perceived as a cynical play by Putin for another stab at the presidency, and, more fundamentally, as yet another giant crack in the foundation of an anemic democracy. [...]

These fears are not unfounded, of course, but for the regular folks, it’s far more simple. Fully 56 percent of Russians support the amendment because, heck, they like the president. Both of them! Of the people less favorably inclined–this third of the population mostly happens to live, by the way, in Russia’s two big (elitist?) cities–some disapprove because they don’t buy the government’s argument that they need more than four years to get everything done. In a country of red tape, city voters feel, perhaps ironically, that four years is plenty of time to achieve policy goals. More than half of the dissenters, however, defend democracy so fiercely as to render it moribund: Twelve percent of Russians say that a constitution is not for amending. Ever.

I like how the elected parliament voting to enact a popular measure constitutes a “giant crack” in the foundation of Russian democracy. Oh well. By contrast, in the United States we have a democracy so an unpopular senate minority has unlimited ability to block popular legislation that secures the support of a majority of the people’s elected representatives.

Meanwhile, the point about the cities is a good one. Most journalists and others who visit Russia go to Petersburg or Moscow — that’s where the action is. But opinion in those cities is atypical of Russian public opinion. And of course it’s a perfectly general problem. A foreign journalist posted in New York or Washington is going to get a misleading view of what the United States is like. And I think you’d say much the same is true of the major cities in just about any country.

Out of the Frying Pan

A Spencer Ackerman source offers an all-too-plausible account of why some in the military might not be all that unhappy with Barack Obama withdrawing from Iraq:

Another challenge for Obama, beyond Petraeus and Iraq, would be senior officers’ desire “to get back to preparing –and procuring — for the big, conventional Russia-China scenario the U.S. military institutionally prefers,” the anonymous Pentagon official said. But the current financial crisis and massive budget deficits create their own pressures on defense spending.

It’s important to avoid simply lurching from one military policy mistake into a different kind of mistake. Or, more broadly, it’s important not to let our foreign policy priorities be defined by the military’s desire to have a good reason for an extremely large procurement budget. Rather, we need to think about what our major priorities are on the international agenda — I would say stabilizing the world economy, combating climate change, curbing nuclear proliferation, eliminating al-Qaeda, and promoting peace and development in the poor world — and then think realistically about the military’s ability to contribute to advancing our agenda on those items relative to other modalities of national power. Note also that the negative space defined by those priorities suggests that maintaining a basically positive relationship with the other major powers is a crucial background condition for progress. Orienting our defense posture around preparing for conflict with Russia and China is antithetical to that.

I think we’ll of course want to maintain a capability to deter attack from another major country, as will Russia and China. But it should be a diplomatic priority to ensure that US-Chinese and US-Russian mutual deterrence take place on a mutually beneficial low-intensity equilibrium (with, e.g., the US and Russia both cutting nuclear arsenals and the Chinese not growing theirs) rather than a mutually destructive arms race. Similarly, the positive lessons from Iraq need to be applied to help us to better conduct stability operations in the future while guarding against hubris and staying cautious about which situations it’s really appropriate for us to involve ourselves in.

Georgia Shot First

New reports indicate that Georgia, far from an innocent victim of vile Russian aggression, in fact started the war that’s had such disastrous consequences for both countries back over the summer:

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm. [...] President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack. [...]

The observations by the monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belorussian airborne captain and a Polish civilian, have been the subject of two confidential briefings to diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, one in August and the other in October. Summaries were shared with The New York Times by people in attendance at both.

Now, none of this justifies later Russian bad acts when they pushed retaliation beyond anything justifiable. But it does help put the war in context and call into question the wisdom of trying to read Georgia-Russia territorial disputes as an ideology driven conflict between white hatted democrats and black hatted authoritarians. It remains the case that the correct position for the United States is to be supportive of Georgian independence and autonomy from Russia, but not to uncritically invest ourselves in the Georgian position over Abkhazia and/or South Ossetia and, in particular, to avoid giving Georgian assurances that it will read as an American commitment to defend them from Russian retaliation if Georgia provokes disputes.

And, of course, one hopes President-Elect Obama won’t be too eager to implement his nominal commitment to bringing Georgia into NATO.